According to present day fire fighting techniques, when a fire truck first approaches the site of the fire, one of the firemen leaps off the fire truck with the end of a hose fed from a hose bed on the truck and fastens the hose to a fire hydrant near the scene of the fire. The truck then feeds out hose and proceeds to the fire while the man making the hose connection remains by the hydrant until he receives a signal from an on-site fireman to release the pressure, subsequent to which the hydrant man runs to the scene of the fire which may be a block or more away, and arrives relatively exhausted.
Because the nozzle end of the hose must be well manned prior to release of the hydrant pressure to prevent the hose from going out of control, and there is no currently available fire fighting equipment to automatically release pressure to the hose, there is no other way of pressurizing the hose aside from that mentioned, which is clearly undesirable both from the standpoint of the hydrant man arriving at the scene out of breath and the fact that his services at the site of the fire are not available for an initial few minutes.
There is a real need for a delayed release valve connectable to a fire hydrant which will either automatically or by remote control release the hydrant pressure without the presence of a fireman.